I

A TIGHT PLACE

“Shoulder to shoulder, boys!  Give it ’em straight!  There’s no going back this journey.”  And the speaker slapped his thigh and laughed.

He was penned in a hot corner with a handful of grinning little Goorkhas, as ready and exultant as himself.  He had no earthly business in that particular spot.  But he had won his way there in a hand-to-hand combat, which had rendered that bit of ground the most desirable abiding-place on the face of the earth.  And being there he meant to stay.

He was established with the inimitable effrontery of British insolence.  He had pushed on through the dark, fired by the enthusiasm which is born of hard resistence.  It had been no slight matter, but neither he nor his men were to be easily dismayed.  Moreover, their patience had been severely tried for many tedious hours, and the removal of the curb had gone to their heads like wine.

Young Derrick Rose, war correspondent, was hot of head and ready of hand.  He had a knack also of getting into tight places and extricating himself therefrom with amazing agility; which knack served to procure for him the admiration of his friends and the respect of his enemies.  It was his first Frontier campaign, but it was not apparently destined to be his last, for he bore a charmed life.  And he went his way with a cheery recklessness that seemed its own security.

On the present occasion he had planted himself, with a serene assumption of authority, at the head of a handful of Goorkhas who had been pressed forward too far by an over-zealous officer in the darkness, and had lost their leader in consequence.

Derrick had stumbled on the group and had forthwith taken upon himself to direct them to a position which, with a good deal of astuteness, he had marked out in his own mind earlier in the day as a desirable acquisition.

There had been a hand-to-hand scuffle in the darkness, and then the tribesmen had fallen back, believing themselves overwhelmed by superior numbers.

Derrick and his Goorkhas had promptly taken possession of the rocky eminence which was the object of their desire, and now prepared, with commendable determination, to maintain themselves at the post thus captured; an impossible feat in consideration of the paucity of their numbers, which fact a wily enemy had already begun to suspect.

That the main force could by any means fail them was a possibility over which for long neither Derrick nor his followers wasted a thought.  Nevertheless half-an-hour of mad turmoil passed, and no help came.

Derrick charitably set down its non-appearance to ignorance of his state and whereabouts, and he began at length to wonder within himself how the place was to be defended throughout the night.  Retreat he would not think of, for he was game to the finger-tips.  But even he could not fail to see that, when the moon rose, he and his followers would be in a very tight fix.